Photos: Contributed
Rob Clare with his son Connor, who will be six, and father Mike. Connor represents the 5th generation of woodworkers in the Clare family as both Rob’s grandfather and then his mother were woodworkers before them.
Rob Clare started Diamond CNC in a garage behind his parents’ house in Ancaster, Ontario in 2013, and today that company has grown into a multi-million dollar family business thanks to a big bet on automation right from day one.
Last year, the company achieved a remarkable $700,000 of sales per employee, but the goal is to up that to one million dollars.
Born and raised in Hamilton, Clare has been involved in the cabinet business more or less all his life.
His father Mike had his own shop building cabinets and kitchens and Clare says when he was growing up he was helping his dad to make some extra cash while he was in school.
Later, his dad was working at Richelieu Hardware, but he kept a shop behind the house where he continued to build kitchens.
“I would come home from school and rather than go inside and waste my time, I’d go to the shop and do some work and make some money,” Clare says.
When we asked Rob what made him start his own company he said it was his dad.
The opportunity was there. And he was tired of working construction, outdoors in minus 20-degree weather.
And since Rob had the background in cabinetry through experience working with his father, he offered to buy the CNC and set up a proper shop behind the house.
In all his years working with Richelieu and visiting countless shops, Mike had seen first hand that just about every shop had the same problem, finding and keeping good and reliable employees.
So he knew the only real solution to the problem and opportunity to overcome it was to bet on automation.
“So I told Rob I’d buy the CNC and he has to learn to run the computer,” Clare says.
“The idea was for him to do this part time until he figured out if that’s what he wanted to do and I think he only did it for a couple of weeks before he decided to quit his job and do it full time.”
“That’s right,” says Rob, who was just 22 at the time.
“I started in July and then I handed in my notice in September.”
“And by the end of October we were up and running full time.”
When Diamond CNC started they were doing cut to size and everything else was an add-on. Mike would make deliveries on his way to work and things quickly grew from there.
“People would ask us to edgeband for them, then if we would assemble for them - so we bought a case clamp, and pretty soon we transitioned into making full cabinet lines for people,” Mike says.
“So every time somebody calls us and asks for something new we will take a look at it and decide if we can make a buck on it and then do it for them.”
They did this from behind the house for about a year and a half and then a neighbour complained and rather than having to rezone the place, they moved to Brantford where they rented a 10,000 sq. ft. building.
“So that meant we had more space and we could do more things and open the doors to more opportunities,” Rob says. The company and the products they manufactured continued to grow and now they deliver fully-assembled, ready-to-install product across North America.
“And we got there by continuously upgrading our systems and automation,” Rob says. “At first we had four people in the office keying in orders and then there might be typos and mistakes so we upgraded to online ordering in 2018. That made that aspect of the business more efficient, we eliminated mistakes and the people looking after that part of the business transitioned into other roles.
Now all the orders they get can be processed in half a day, which is much more efficient and better for everyone.
“And that continues to be our approach every day, we keep asking ourselves, how can we do more with less.
“We had the same problem as everybody else, how do you find reliable people? So our solution was and continues to be automation,” says Rob. “And we constantly reinvested in our technology so that we could grow the business through technology and automation. For us that’s really the only reliable way to do that.”
“Right now it’s to the point where we have as many robots as people,” says Mike with a chuckle.
Keep growing
Having continuously grown the company, they made the decision – about four years ago - to move to a larger facility and ended up moving all the way to Nanticoke in Southwestern Ontario.
The new facility offers 32,000 sq. ft. of space and there are three people (including Rob) in the shop – they are looking to add one more – and three robots.
Half their business is done through dealers; the other half is with other cabinet shops.
When other shops have large orders, for instance for multi-family residential units or condos, they call on Diamond CNC to help them build it.
Another big turning point for Diamond CNC came about a year and a half ago when they signed a big contract with CNC Automation and Nanxing at IWF in Atlanta.
CNC Automation had just become the exclusive Canadian distributor for Nanxing in Canada and Diamond CNC decided to enter into an agreement with CNC Automation to fully automate their panel processing operation backed by the functionality of Nanxing machinery with their automation and software partners. That made them the first customer in Canada to sign a deal for this new solution.
“We had started doing our homework and research into what was out there and what would work for us about eight months before that,” Mike says.
“We went on several tours and looked at what was available from other companies before we decided to go with CNC Automation.
“The point of it was to increase our level of automation,” says Rob.
“We were already pretty automated, but we needed more. We didn’t want to upgrade and still have people operating machines and pushing carts between machines and different areas. So even though the machines we had were automated, the processes in between weren’t, but that’s what we were looking for. Complete automation, the highest level of automation for the entire production run we could get.”
“So now, we have just one person, and that is Rob, loading the CNC, cutting, edging, drilling, sorting and dowelling,” Mike says. “He is just walking around the cell making sure everything is going the way it’s supposed to, and topping up glue and dowels and checking for any imperfections and making little adjustments if required.
“It’s incredible really.”
This new level of automation has allowed them to repurpose the people that used to do that work to focus on assembly, because most of their production is delivered fully assembled.
“So now these guys have moved from being operators to assembly and packaging,” Mike says.
“At full capacity we do 150 cabinets per shift with 10 people. Other shops - according to industry averages - would require about 60 people to produce that number.”
Last year they produced about $700,000 of sales per employee, which is a remarkable number and up from the still-impressive $500,000 they achieved just a few years ago.
And this is not the end of it. Mike says they hope to get to a million dollars per employee once they are running at full capacity.
But before they can get there, they need to expand the shop because their new bottleneck now is storage.
“We can store about 500 cabinets in our warehouse right now, but we need more space once we’re fully running at capacity. So we are looking at putting that addition on this year if things continue they way they are right now,” Mike says.
“It’s been a bit of a process, a bit of an adventure to get this far because they were the first shop in North America to put in that system. So there were some growing pains. For instance, the software had to be translated to English and we had to change it to let us do batch size one etc.,” Mike says.
“We had great support from CNC Automation, they were here all the time setting it up and getting it to run and rewriting software as required for our production and specific needs.
We never had to stop our production; we just had to slow it down for a couple of months while the Nanxing line was getting up to speed.
“But now that it is running, it is incredible. We used to be able to cut 30 or 40 sheets in a day, Rob yesterday cut 70 sheets in half a day, by himself. So that is a huge difference.
Photo: Woodworking
From left: Andrew Legault, CNC Automation president; Rob Clare, Diamond CNC president; Mike Clare, Diamond CNC CFO; Peter Liu, Nanxing international sales director and Bob Law, CNC Automation VP of sales.
Diamond CNC manufactures its own MDF doors, but they buy thermo doors from OnBoard, and Mike built his own finishing line using an automated Panel Pro sander in front of a Cefla spray machine and then an oven using Sun Spots. It takes 12 minutes to run anything through.
“I was supposed to retire from the shop at Christmas,” Mike says with a laugh, “but that didn’t happen.
“We’re getting real close now though, I think everything will be complete in a few weeks and then we can focus on production.
“It’s funny, I already had a few other cabinet shop owners asking me if I’d build them a factory, but I always say let’s get this one done first. But yes, by the time we are done we’ve done all the work for everybody else, so it will be easy.
“I mean we all build the same boxes and it’ll be easy for the next shop to make a few minor adjustments to make it work for them.”
Mike says getting the new line was a multi-million dollar investment, but the way things are going it is well worth it. Based on the orders already received, Mike says for 2026 we’re going to do double of what we did in 2025.”
And what he likes most is that Diamond CNC has and continues to be a real family company. Rob owns the company, Mike owns the building and his wife Terri-Sue also works in the company. From answering the phone and bookkeeping to scheduling, she makes it all happen.
“Most days it’s really good working with your family. Of course there are some difficult days, but really, it’s great and a lot of fun.
And as Rob said the first time we spoke to him: “I was really fortunate because my parents (Mike and Terri-Sue Clare) believed in me and were willing to put their house on the line so I could buy my first CNC machine and start the business. I am so grateful because there is no way I could have done any of this without them.”
Most of their business is in Ontario and if it’s within about three hours of the shop they use their own trucks for deliveries and anything further than that is delivered through a shipping company.
Another big part of their business is building high-end, built-in closets, mostly for export.
